Two Rules Of War
by RedBrunja
Summary: “The evening after they buried Maes, Riza got absolutely wasted for the fourth time in her entire life.” The tenses were jumbled up in her head and she didn’t want them to untangle, not really. Hints of RoyRiza.


_**Two Rules Of War**_

The evening after they buried Maes, Riza got absolutely wasted for the fourth time in her entire life.

It was tradition to sing the dead's praises on the night they went into the ground, and if that tradition blurred a bit, became anecdotes over body bags and expressions of regret over the report that officially declared a soldier MIA, well, this wasn't wartime, and Hughes had been well-loved and well-liked when people didn't want to smother him in his sleep.

There hadn't been much discussion but when Riza and Mustang had taken the train back to Eastern, Armstrong, Ross, and Brash had come as well.

They'd all ended up back in Riza's apartment, and precisely five minutes after Havoc's shift ended, he'd appeared on Riza's doorstep, towing Fury along with him and carrying enough alcohol to start a bar.

They'd all crowded into her miniscule living room, and Riza found herself sitting against the wall and drinking mediocre sake like lemonade. Which she'd prefer actually, she decided, working a thumbnail under the bottle's label. Havoc was sitting near Ross and was regaling them all with various tales that Riza knew where complete lies at best. The sake had a bitter undertone that Riza was experienced enough to know would become absolutely revolting tomorrow morning. On the plus side, it blurred things marvelously, and after today (she carefully didn't think about today, which didn't have her absolutely worst memories in it but did contain a number of new, highly unpleasant ones) she could use some blurring.

"To the Brigader-General," Havoc toasted, and his speech wasn't slurred at all, even though she knew he'd been drinking since he walked in her door. "If I had known it was that easy to climb the ranks, I would have gotten killed myself."

Brash found this amusing and after Riza slugged back a swallows of sake, the joke approached tastelessness and barely made her want to shoot him much.

"So it's your turn," Armstrong said to her.

"Right," she responded and started ripping the label off the bottle. "The first time I met Hughes," Riza said conversationally, "I was convinced that he was absolutely useless and I arrived at the conclusion that the–" Her mind stumbled over _Mustang–LieutenantColonel–Roy_ until she came to his current rank, which wasn't what he'd been then but if she started throwing in past ranks everyone would be confused and it didn't really matter at all. "The Colonel was keeping him around for comedic relief."

This cracked everybody up, and Maria, who'd just come back from the kitchen where she'd miraculously found edible food from Riza's cupboards, had to lean against the wall and almost dropped the platter in her hands.

"He kept _rhapsodizing,_" Riza continued, letting bits of paper label fall through her hands, and dear gods, if she could pronounce 'rhapsodizing' correctly she was nowhere _near _drunk enough. That was probably why she kept hearing a child crying. She'd though that half a bottle of sake would shut Elysia up, but no, apparently Hughes'd raised a prodigious drinker with lungs like a opera singer. Hughes had. Should have. The tenses were jumbled up in her head and she didn't want them to untangle, not really. She had enough people she spoke of in past tense, and not all of them were six feet under (but she wasn't thinking about that) and Hughes didn't deserve to be one of them.

Armstrong reached over to shake her foot. "And then what happened?" he asked.

"Then I decided his fiancée must be the vainest woman alive, to have not grown sick of his constant..." she trailed off looking for the right word. "Fawning," she decided. "His constant fawning and killed him. Then I met Glacier–" _wearing black and standing straight, as if the man she loved wasn't about to be put under dirt_ "–realized she was worthy of a least half of Maes' complements, and that the gods must protect madmen and fools."

There was a pause after she was done, and Riza didn't look up. She'd told the wrong story. Nothing that mentioned the widowed woman and fatherless daughter left behind was the right thing for tonight; she should have told them about the time Hughes had misread the train schedule and stranded them in the south west corner of Eastern province for two and a half days. Mustang'd been ready to flambé him, and Riza had seriously considered finding an accelerant and helping.

Riza thought about that trip, Mustang yelling about demotions and incineration and Hughes standing behind her while she did her best to remain calm. For some reason, her eyes wanted to prickle.

Armstrong had taken over the storyteller role, and at this point the participants in his tale seemed to be a long-dead and famous ancestor of his and a talking tree; Riza was sure that it would wind around to Hughes eventually, and wanted to be out of her apartment before that happened. Getting some air sounded good.

She grabbed a fresh bottle of something from the floor as she exited and Havoc protested.

"You can't take all the booze!"

One bottle was hardly 'all the booze' but she only retorted "Privilege of rank, Second Lieutenant," and left.

The night air did nothing to cool her flushed cheeks. She'd left her jacket back in her apartment but the breeze only caused her arms to prickle irritably.

Riza started walking, habit taking her toward Eastern Command.

She wanted... She wanted to know who killed Hughes, wanted to see their face over the barrel of her gun, wanted to pay them back for Glacier and Elysia and for putting that lost, doomed look on Mustang's face. She wanted to see their body jerk and blood splatter, she wanted Elysia's voice and Glacier's tears out of head and even though she knew that killing Hughes' murderer would no nothing to exorcize the memories, she wanted the bitter taste of revenge in her mouth. _(Didn't she know better by now?)_

She stopped, suddenly aware that she was wandering down a deserted street being melodramatic. She pivoted on her heel, looked behind her, and tossed the bottle she'd been carrying at the trash receptacle a half block away. She made the shot, and in the almost silent street she clearly heard the crunch as it into plummeted into other bits of garbage. Riza turned and continued walking.

This was why she never drank; she started getting maudlin and overwrought, and then her ghosts started speaking in voices above a whisper.

Eastern Central was quiet, and Riza knew where all the guards were posted. She was able to walk into Command without crossing anyone's path, which didn't speak well for the security, but she wasn't in the mood to find however was in charge and yell at them.

She wandered along the colonnades for a while, and watched the white steps fall away to her left, the floodlights set around the perimeter making the steps look even more pristine than normal.

The intermittent breeze had managed to become pleasantly cool, and Riza didn't think to hard about why she turned to go inside.

She found Roy in his office and felt no surprise.

The light on his desk was on, but the rest of the room was dark, and he was standing at one of the windows, staring out past the iron-spiked fence, towards the city beyond. He didn't react to her presence.

Riza walked over toward him, her footsteps the only noise the the room. She looked out past him. It was a pretty view, late enough that only a few squares of light where scattered around the city. If she looked in the right places, Riza could even see a few of the brighter stars.

"It wasn't your fault," she said, and she wouldn't have spoke if she'd know her voice would sound so low and debauched. "You couldn't have known."

He still didn't respond, and Riza was grabbed by the sudden dread that he was gone, already dead, that the thing standing in front of her was a golem, a ghost, not the flesh-and-blood colonel she'd follow to hell and back. Without thinking, she reached for him, her hands on his neck, frantic to feel a pulse against her fingers.

He reacted them, whirling around to face her, hands snapping around her wrists before she managed to do more than brush against the stiff cloth of his collar.

She felt his fingers around her wrists, gripping hard enough to leave bruises and incongruously cool.

"These are not the times to forgo wearing your gloves," Riza said politely, impressed at how level her tone was, like she hadn't stepped over a number of very important lines mere moments before.

"I should have known," Mustang said, biting off the ends of the words.

Riza broke his hold on her with a flick of the wrists so simple she'd learned in years before she joined the military.

"How exactly, sir, were you to have known Hughes was in danger?"

Mustang turned back to the window, and didn't answer her.

She walked over to his desk. His gloves were lying crumpled in one corner, and she straightened them out meticulously, feeling the odd texture of starter cloth and running the tips of her fingers over the arrays stitched on the backs.

"He was my subordinate," Mustang said, and Riza looked at him over her shoulder. "I should had done something to save him." She remembered his words at Maes' grave and was grateful she was not a alchemist, and would never be faced with the temptation to raising the dead. And she was even more grateful that if he went down that path, she would most likely be labeled a collaborator, and wouldn't be the one given the order to shoot.

She finished smoothing his gloves, and walked over to one of the couches. She said down, folded her arms over the back, and closed her eyes. The leather leached heat from her body, and she felt almost level for the first time since she'd heard the news and seen Mustang's face go tight with pain.

"You need to question Armstrong," she said into the couch.

"Why do you suggest the Strong Arm Alchemist?" the Colonel asked after a moment.

"Because," Riza licked her lips and tasted salt and alcohol, "he looked at Elysia with guilt in his eyes."

"Thank you," he said.

Insinuations about fellow offices wasn't the kind of thing she liked being thanked for. The image of Glacier and Elysia clinging together rose in her mind and Hawkeye wanted somebody to shoot.


End file.
